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Drafts: Phase IV

Composition as Related to Weights of Animals and Cuts

Phase IV of Drafts is based on nine images from the Reanimation Library's archive selected by writer, editor, and archivist Craig Dworkin. Expanding upon an image from Phase III of a mouse test subject, this fourth set riffs on embodied grids, from the mammals of Minnesota to an early chess machine named Belle. The program will include presentations by artists Lanny Jordan Jackson, Benjamin Tiven, and Penelope Umbrico. Listen to Introduction by Kaegan SparksLanny Jordan Jackson will screen a new video, Triple Shark Cerberus, which features the repetition of choreographed scenes concerning a collapse in monologue and dialogue, hesitation and deliberation. A wayward subject—a bit assassin, a bit dancer—attempts to discern a path while in possession of language and its effects. Listen to Artist's Introduction and Watch VideoBenjamin Tiven will give a multimedia talk called The Cat, the Gull, and the Ass on artificial seagulls, lions using video cameras, and the effect of industrial technologies on the notion "animal." He will also present a short reconstruction of one of Aesop's fables. Watch PresentationPenelope Umbrico will present a string of loosely connected thoughts and images around the idea of the grid, modernism, boxes, holdings, materiality, and the body. Watch PresentationListen to Conclusion by Kaegan SparksABOUT DRAFTS:Activating The Drawing Center's newly inaugurated Lab gallery as a site for innovative, impromptu, and experimental considerations of drawing, Drafts, a series of curated public programs organized by Kaegan Sparks, encourages speculative tangents from images in a variety of creative practices. A draft—as a preliminary sketch, an embryonic form subject to revision, a current of moving air—provides a model for the series, promoting conjecture, digression, and dérive through overlapping curatorial and creative functions.Each program will derive from images in the archive of the Reanimation Library, an initiative based in Brooklyn dedicated to salvaging and stewarding obsolete or ‘pedestrian’ books that have fallen out of circulation, with an emphasis on remarkable visual content.Drawing on the collaborative energy and associative thinking of the Surrealist exercise cadavre exquis, the programs of Drafts will unfold in a participant-driven evolution. An initial series of nine images culled from the library’s books will mutate over the course of the series, as multiple curators and artists take turns at revision, extracting an image from the preceding set and re-contextualizing it among other images. Each resulting set will form the basis for a program, in which assorted artists, writers, and other cultural producers will respond.Various voices are thus gradually incorporated into a capricious and collaborative line of thinking: working in contingent succession, every contributor builds and strays from the mark of the last.